How Anti-Sodomy Laws Were Sunk: Racism-Jealousy-and a False Police Report

If you love John Grisham’s fictional legal thrillers, you’ll be riveted to Dale Carpenter’s real life page-turner Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas. Carpenter is a Law professor at the University of Minnesota and is involved with LGBTQ legal issues.

Told from the perspectives of the plaintiffs, arresting officers, attorneys, judges and prosecutors, Flagrant Conduct is a detailed account of the 2003 landmark case of Lawrence v. Texas in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its 1986 decision in the Bowers v. Hardwick sodomy case, making same-gender sexual activity legal throughout the country.

I remember this case vividly. A bogus call to the Houston, Texas police about a burglary from a prying neighbor resulted in the police entering the home of John Lawrence and Tyron Garner. The men were allegedly engaging in consensual sex . Reports vary wildly on what the officers saw with one reporting the men were not even in the same room. The men were arrested and held overnight in jail. They were charged with violating the state’s anti-sodomy law. Both men plead no contest to the charge.

The man who called the police to report a domestic disturbance, Robert Eubanks, was later charged with filing a false police report and spent 15 days in jail.

Writing in favor of the ruling, Justice Kennedy stated that “The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government. It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.”

It was great to awake on the morning of June 27, 2003, to read the headlines stating that the highest court of this land struck down the Texas law that had criminalized sexual relationships between consenting adults. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision was momentous—especially given the conservative composition of the court and the reactionary times in which we reside.

To see photos of John Lawrence and Tyron Garner of Houston— the two men who spurred the case— giving the nation a victory smile signaled, at least legislatively, a shift in protecting the private lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Americans.

But for some Americans the photo of Lawrence and Garner wasn’t disturbing just because they were two gay men. The silent issue in the Lawrence v. Texas case was race. While race was not on trial, it was certainly the elephant in the room. The interracial component of Garner’s and Lawrence’s relationship disgusted some folks—black and white—just as much, if not more, as their homosexuality. Many have speculated that the false call to the police was motivated by racism.

For many of these same Americans, this victory was seen as a signed decree sanctioning sexual depravity. Newsweek that year reported on its “ick factor,” the revulsion some heterosexuals feel toward the way we LGBTQ people engage in sexual intimacy. (Obviously , the Will & Grace—theory, based on the television sitcom of two gay characters that aired from 1998—2006, that the most important indicator of supporting LGBTQ civil rights is whether one knows, has frequent contact or sees frequently someone who is LGBTQ—had no effect on them.)

While Carpenter successfully depicts that the legal heart of Lawrence v. Texas is about privacy, that all sexual relationships—heterosexual and LGBTQ— between consenting adults should feel safe from unwarranted intrusions into our homes by the government, many still feel, however, that the moral soul of the issue is that an act of sodomy is an abomination to God.

Sodomy was a crime defined, according to 18th Century British commentator William Blackstone, “not fit to be named.” And sodomy laws once targeted both heterosexuals as well as homosexuals.

The invention of sodomy is rooted in Christian theology. The anti-sodomitic theological tradition derives from a homophobic and misogynist reading of the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative in Genesis 19. As one of the most quoted scriptures to argue for compulsory heterosexuality, the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative has become authoritatively damaging not only to LGBTQ people, but to women as well, because women are the real victims we read about in the text, and LGBTQ people are the scapegoats who are read into the text.

Overturning Texas’ sodomy law marked a new era not only for LGBTQ people, but also for all Americans. The sanctity of our private sexual lives must be protected, because the issue of our private lives is a matter of justice not only to be argued openly in the courtrooms, but also is a justice issue to be acted out privately in our bedrooms.

But here’s the melodramatic twist in this landmark case that Carpenter discloses: the plaintiffs, John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, weren’t lovers.

As a matter-of-fact, in an act of jealous rage and drunkenness on the night of September 17, 1998, Tyron Garner’s white lover, Robert Eubanks, phoned police warning that a black man was “going crazy with a gun” in John Lawrence’s apartment.

In other words, as The New Yorker writer, Dahlia Lithwick, wrote in her article Extreme Makeover, “the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.”

When police arrived they arrested Garner, because he was African American, and Lawrence because it was his apartment.

Both Lawrence and Garner have died, but their landmark case will live on in legal perpetuity. What won’t be remember about them that Carpenter’s Flagrant Conduct reminds us is that they were accidental plaintiffs with little to lose in admitting they violated Texas’s sodomy laws.

Rev. Irene Monroe is a Ford Fellow and doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School. One of Monroe’s outreach ministries is the several religion columns she writes - “The Religion Thang,” for In Newsweekly, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender newspaper that circulates widely throughout New England, “Faith Matters” for The Advocate Magazine, a national gay & lesbian magazine, and “Queer Take,” for The Witness, a progressive Episcopalian journal. Her writings have also appeared in Boston Herald and in the Boston Globe. Her award-winning essay, “Louis Farrakhan’s Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia”, was greeted with critical acclaim. Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American , queer and religious studies. As an religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.”

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